Wind

There must be something wrong with my patriotism, because I don’t care who owns the company that makes my cellphone work. I don’t care if they’re Canadian, American, Dutch, Swedish, Egyptian or some polyglot combination of them all. I wouldn’t care if Robert Mugabe owned the company, if it provided better service and less annoyance. […]

“Jews are pro-nuclear because of Israel,” a Jewish colleague and former federal energy official told me near the beginning of my environmental career, to help me in my puzzlement as to why so many Jews supported this technology. Nuclear reactors, from my perspective, had nothing going for them — they produced ruinously expensive electricity, they […]

Thirty years ago, ragtag environmentalists idealistically opposed nuclear power and the monopoly utilities that kept it in business, arguing that wind, solar, biomass and ethanol were more economic as well as cleaner. It was a David versus Goliath battle, and also a battle between free markets and government regulation, because in those days, before the […]

A device implanted in Lake Ontario to measure wind will stay put for another year, despite opposition from residents who want to end the prospect of wind turbines off the Scarborough bluffs. Mayor Rob Ford and a majority of his executive committee agreed that Toronto Hydro should complete the two-year test of wind speed, direction […]

A powerful typhoon struck Japan on Wednesday, pummeling the Tokyo area with heavy rain, disrupting public transportation and leaving four people dead, and it was headed towards the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Typhoon Roke, the second big storm to hit Japan this month, was packing winds of up to 220 km per hour and dumped […]

Update: The wind warning in effect for Toronto has now been lifted. Strong winds hit the GTA on Thursday leading to a number of hydro outages, school closures and some potential travel delays. The wind warning issued by Environment Canada for Toronto is still in effect, after wind gusts continue to reach the 95 km/h […]

Going with wind means going without power Electricity consumers in the UK will need to get used to flicking the switch and finding the power unavailable, according to Steve Holliday, CEO of National Grid, the country’s grid operator. Because of a six-fold increase in wind generation, which won’t be available when the wind doesn’t blow, […]

Power companies around the world are planning to spend trillions of dollars building smart grids — next-generation marvels likened to the transcontinental railroad and the Internet because they are seen as revolutionizing society. It won’t happen. The smart grid is nothing more than a politically driven fantasy that has no economic rationale other than to […]